TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami/NSF) — Florida attracted a document variety of vacationers throughout the first three months of 2022, surpassing totals from comparable quarters earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the hospitality and leisure trade.
Visit Florida, the state’s tourism-marketing company, posted information Friday displaying that 35.982 million folks traveled to the state between the beginning of January and the top of March.
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With tourism a key engine of the state’s economic system, that was 39.6 p.c larger than throughout the first quarter of 2021, a time when COVID-19 vaccines had been changing into extra broadly accessible. It additionally was 19.29 p.c over the primary quarter of 2020, when the virus hit the state.
More vital for tourism officers, the brand new whole was up 1.35 p.c from the primary quarter of 2019, earlier than the pandemic began.
“I can tell you by seeing all the cars on the road, I think that there’s a lot more people still coming to visit Florida,” Gov. Ron DeSantis stated throughout a May 4 news convention at Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill in Clearwater.
As has been the case for the reason that pandemic began, the overwhelming majority of individuals touring to Florida — 95 p.c — throughout the first three months of the 12 months got here from different states.
After DeSantis alluded to document home tourism throughout the May 4 look, Visit Florida President and CEO Dana Young credited the DeSantis-led push to reopen companies months after the preliminary hit from the pandemic.
“The ability to be in market for almost seven months … where not another state was doing anything outside their borders, helped us create an incredible strategic advantage for the state of Florida,” Young stated.
Florida has now recorded 4 consecutive quarters attracting greater than 30 million guests. It additionally has posted three consecutive quarters with numbers topping the identical intervals in 2019, when the state dealt with a document 131.07 million vacationers.
Even with the will increase throughout this 12 months’s first quarter, the state attracted simply 1.323 million guests from abroad and 578,000 from Canada.
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In the primary quarter of 2019, the state noticed 2.276 million abroad vacationers and 1.446 million Canadians.
The variety of abroad vacationers fell to 1.76 million within the first quarter of 2020, as companies and borders started shutting down. With virus-related restrictions hindering most worldwide journey in 2021, the first-quarter whole dropped to 492,000.
After attracting almost 1.45 million Canadians within the first quarter of 2019, the numbers fell to 1.25 million within the first quarter of 2020 and 55,000 in the identical interval of 2021.
COVID-19 journey restrictions imposed by Canada additionally resulted in Colombia being the highest nation of origin for worldwide vacationers throughout the full 12 months of 2021.
Visit Florida recorded 709,000 guests in 2021 from the South American nation, accounting for 15.3 p.c of worldwide vacationers coming to Florida. Canada was subsequent at 584,000 guests for the 12 months, adopted by Mexico at 389,000 and Peru at 261,000.
In 2019, 4.09 million Canadians got here to Florida, making up 29.4 p.c of the state’s vacationers. The United Kingdom was second at 9.6 p.c, with 1.33 million guests. Colombia ranked fifth behind Brazil and Argentina.
Florida lawmakers in March handed a proposed price range that features $50 million to fund Visit Florida’s tourism-marketing efforts throughout the upcoming 2022-2023 fiscal 12 months. The company acquired $80 million for the present fiscal 12 months, which included $30 million in federal stimulus cash. Lawmakers haven’t formally despatched the 2022-2023 spending plan to DeSantis, who has line-item veto energy.
Last Friday, DeSantis signed into regulation a measure (SB 434) that extends the authorization of Visit Florida from Oct. 1, 2023, to Oct. 1, 2028.
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